Friday, August 24, 2007

Come for the annual felling of the tree!

Last year, when the large tree limb fell on my house, I begged the tree removal expert to remove that tree. He argued that it still had several good years left in it, and he hated to bring down a perfectly good tree before its time -- especially as we are the "Maple City" and the tree in question was a century-old sugar maple.

Well, my fears were more founded than his, I'm thinking.

Our neighborhood had some pretty rough weather yesterday. Just up the road, in Kirkwood, IL, some accounts clock the straight-line winds at anything from 95 to 128 miles per hour (or, if you work metric, it comes to roughly 153 to 206 kph). It came with about 1.4 inches of rain in the first half-hour of the storm. Just up here in Monmouth, we got slightly less severe winds, but still an inch of rain in about 25 minutes, and it came down horizontally.

I was over here at Mom & Pop's place, working on this here computer thingy. In the middle of the storm, the power went out. Call me paranoid, but the first thing I did when the conditions allowed was to get into my car and get over to my own house.This was visible from my car, directly in front of the folks' place.

But below was what waited for me at home.

The pick-up truck belongs to the son of the neighbors directly across the street from me. He had just received the call to come to work, right before the storm hit. He's lucky -- we're lucky -- he was running a little late.

The irony here is, he had parked his truck in what is normally my space -- so I can have easy access to my own sidewalk, and not have to walk on uneven ground. I'm usually up and gone by noon, so if he'd parked in his normal space, ten feet forward, his truck would have been fine.

My house will be without power for a few days, they guess. I'm one of only a few thousand whose lines went down in the storm.

I may bring TiGrr and Peanut over to the folks' place a week ahead of schedule.